In general case os can handle load well, fairly sharing resources among processes. But in some cases it makes it poorly. As an example it can be ill-minded pseudo-security stuff like antiviruses or mediaanalysers that searches forbidden content on your mac (due to gov.policies that apple have to accept). Or it can be backup that crawls fs in background.

To help resolve such situation this utility was made. Some malicious processes can be reniced to lower nicelevels (say, 19) and for some good processes nicelevel can be raisen to higher values (-19 if reniced run as superuser or 0 if as normal).

In some critical cases process can be killed (if you want to know more about it see "man kill" in terminal).

How to build, configure, run it

You will need Go lang 1.21 or newer, gnu make, terminal and possibly internets to build this utility.

To build reniced just type in project dir

make

this will produce binary named "reniced".

Copy to your home directory .reniced.yaml.example as .reniced.yaml and edit it to suit your needs. After you done, you can run utility as:

./reniced

if you have no access to superuser or

sudo ./reniced

if you can sudo. That's it.

Note: negative niceness values can be set only by root.

Note2: MacOS has too tight (or intrusive) security measures, so running something as system daemon is very difficult task. Reniced can be run via sudo as daemon or backbround process (say, in tmux). On linux systems usually there is no such obstacle and if reniced run from user with id=0, its config should be placed at /etc/reniced.yaml

Install as systemd service

Supplied systemd unit is ready to install in system as-is and should work ok. It expect to see reniced at /usr/sbin/reniced and assume that reniced runs as foreground task - in config file "daemon" setting either absent or set to false.

Install as System V Init service

Unlike supplpied systemd unit, supplied System V Init script assumes reniced runs as daemon (in config file "daemon" setting must be set to true). Script also expects to find pid-file at /var/run/reniced.pid and executable itself at /usr/sbin/reniced.

Special "thanks"

To security assholes that disrupt workflows and make this world worse.